


And Eats You When You're Sleeping

by voodoochild



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Foreshadowing, Gen, Mind Games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-10
Updated: 2010-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-12 14:25:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/125803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The End of Time is coming. Zagreus never left. Major spoilers for "Waters of Mars" and the Big Finish audio "Zagreus".</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Eats You When You're Sleeping

**Author's Note:**

> Written very belatedly for the **sharp_teeth** ficathon, for the prompt: _"the TARDIS is awake and not so benign"_. Big Finish has already tackled this one in Zagreus, so here, have a story that picks up where that left off. Takes place post-"Waters of Mars", and foreshadows a number of events in "End of Time", so consider yourself warned. Major spoilers, though, for the Big Finish audios _Neverland_ and _Zagreus_ , as well as some of the other Charley audios - most notably _The Girl That Wasn't There_. Love to **thatyourefuse** , for the cheerleading.

The first thing the Doctor thinks when he steps into the TARDIS - Time Lord Victorious (or is that Vicious? Possibly Valorous?), who can bend the laws of time and space to his will, who commands power with a snap of his fingers - is that he's felt like this before. There was a time once, long ago, when he felt this same effortless sense of control. No, maybe it's lack of control, lack of conscious control. He didn't even have to think about saving Bowie Base One, just pulled at the threads until they wove into a new timeline.

Child's play, really. A childlike sense of victory: I did it, and you can't stop me!

He doesn't know whom that last boast is directed to - there's no one left to stop him. Not that he needs it.

The rhyme comes to him, unbidden. It's never left, not even after his return from the Divergent Universe, not even after the Time War. It winds its way through him, because words have power. You can never really get rid of them.

( _Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead . . ._ )

It's been centuries, but his vision blurs with the remembered pain of it. All bright fire and pure rage, his voice twisting in his chest and coming out wrong. Transforming into a howling, shrieking, roaring maddened thing, barely conscious of what was happening. A cat in a box, neither alive nor dead. Both alive and dead.

Both himself and Zagreus.

But it hadn't just been him possessed by Zagreus, had it? It had been his TARDIS, too, and what with the Master and the Eye of Harmony and Rassilon and Romana and the Time War and Rose and Jack and Donna and Martha and Astrid and Jackson and - and . . . well, there was no time.

Isn't that a hilarious proposition? No time. For a Time Lord.

That must be why he's laughing. That must be why the TARDIS is laughing, standing before him in humanoid form. Except it's not the Brigadier his TARDIS has become now. Oh, he _knows_ that laugh. No, no, no, no no no nononononono.

"Oh yes."

"Stop it," he growls. "You're dead. Dead and gone at least three times over."

"But I'm not," the TARDIS says. "Oh, come now, my dear Doctor, let's not mince words. You know as well as I that I'm not actually him. And you know that this form isn't simply a whim. It's familiar - familiar in the way the good Brigadier's wasn't."

"Oh, no you don't. You're doing this to - to - get even. Or something. I don't know which, but you're going to stop it right now, TARDIS."

"I don't believe I am. Listen to you - such _arrogance_. Proclaiming yourself the Lord and Master of Time. I don't think I approve. Either of me."

"But I am," he insists. "Last of the Time Lords, best of the Time Lords. I can do anything."

"Can you now? Couldn't meddle in that timeline. Couldn't save poor Adelaide. Could not, will not, cheat Death. Not you, Doctor. After all, she is quite fond of you."

The TARDIS laughs again, that wicked cackle that sounds like nothing more than the sharpest of blades being drawn quicksilver-fast across millions of throats. His - her, he should say, because the body is male, but his TARDIS is female - clothing changes in the blink of an eye (the Doctor tries not to blink): first the immaculate black suit he wore when he was possessing Kamelion, next brushed velvet and gold collar ( _his killing suit_ , the Doctor thinks, _he killed me in it, he killed a quarter of the universe in it, killed again and again_ ), then the silver-blue waistcoat, hint of cat fangs brushing his lower lip. The Mast- no, the TARDIS, it's still his TARDIS - finally settles into the white robes fifth him remembers from Castrovalva.

"I always did have a fondness for this apparel," the TARDIS purrs. "After all, white is for mourning."

"Only in certain cultures on certain planets. Hell, if you want mourning clothes, you could go for the traditional pink veils from Kelebrian III," the Doctor replies, unable to stop the reflexive joke. This is no laughing matter, except he's still laughing.

He was like this before. Laughing in the dark as he hunted down Charley, laughing and lunging and lunching.

No. He didn't hurt her, did he?

( _. . . Zagreus lies all other ways, Zagreus comes when Time's a maze . . ._ )

"You hurt them all, Doctor," the TARDIS says, "All of them. They think of me as a labyrinth and you as Ariadne guiding them safely through. They're wrong. You are the Minotaur who wants to catch them. I am the labyrinth who wants to eat them. You really should remember that old rhyme in its entirety."

"You- No. You can't. You liked all of my companions!"

The TARDIS slinks closer, circling him like a large cat with prey that isn't smart enough to run. "Did I? Some of them, yes, I was quite fond of. But there were others you know I didn't care for. Remember sweet Miss Pollard? And how anything that wanted to could get inside that pretty little head of hers? I didn't protect her. I didn't want to."

A flash of memory flits from the TARDIS to him, and he remembers. Remembers how sixth him had been suspicious of the mysterious girl named Mila, who had become Charley and then not-Charley because eighth him couldn't know her. Remembers having to break time in pieces to save her aboard the R101. Remembers the Cybermen and Singapore and the Krotons and, and, and . . .

"She isn't the only one." The TARDIS is playing with a string, weaving it in impossible shapes with deft fingers. A five-dimensional cube. A causal nexus. The event horizon of a black hole. "It hasn't been so long since Rose, has it?"

The Doctor's gaze snaps up, and he seizes the string, ripping it to shreds. "Don't you dare!"

"Dare? I killed her - well, she killed herself, really. I simply helped her along. And then you went and made me kill you instead, which, may I inform you, is not at all a fitting substitution."

"It was to me."

The TARDIS scoffs, scraping too-long nails against a console - it's a filthy lie, the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, you can interact with your selves just fine if you're Gallifreyan - one after another. Screech screech screech screeeeeeeeech.

He presses his hands to his ears. "Stop it! Just stop!"

"You won't. You'll just do it again; find another helpless human. Lure them into my magical world to show them the universe. And then you'll let me have them, because you can't help it. I let the Council find Jamie and Victoria. I could have stopped the crash that killed Adric. I left Tegan at Heathrow. I brought Roz back to the N-Forms. I left Peri with Yrcanos and Ace on Gallifrey and Susan on Earth and Jack on Satellite Five. I got inside Rose Tyler and Donna Noble and I destroyed them. And do you know - I rather think we enjoyed it."

Denial.

Betrayal.

Fury.

And he can't do a damned thing about it.

( _. . . the reward that he is reaping . . ._ )

He runs - he always ran, always and forever running away from responsibility - just takes off out of the console room. He doesn't know where he thinks he's going, because the TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental. She looks however she wants to look. The whole "desktop theme" thing is really more for his own comfort than anything; if she wanted to, she could turn herself into a howling void. There used to _be_ a howling void, up on Level J. He's not sure why she hasn't done it now - the thrill of the chase, he supposes.

The corridors are lengthening, doubling back upon themselves like a Moebius strip, and it's only by blind luck that he locates the Zero Room. But she's onto him, his TARDIS, and simply deposits him right back out in the corridor again. The next door on the left should be his room, but when he throws open the door, he's blasted with heat.

It's Sarn.

Harmless green ion fire intertwining with deadly orange fire, and the TARDIS comes slinking through the flames like the being she's impersonating once did. Does she think he's forgotten? He broke one of Gallifrey's highest laws - the knowing murder of another Time Lord. It doesn't matter that the Master would have killed him. It doesn't matter that the Master _has_ killed him. He is no better.

"Bravo, Doctor," the TARDIS says, sliding out from the shadows, back in the black suit again. "It took you long enough - you never did let me finish back there."

"Is this what you wanted?" he says, disgustedly. "To rub my nose in my past sins?"

The TARDIS honestly seems surprised. "You've always held life in the highest regard. Can you truly blame me?"

"You, the Master? No. You, my TARDIS? Yes. Why does it mean so much to you that I left the Master to die on Sarn? It's not as if it took!"

"Because you should have treated one of your own people better than that!" She indicates her appearance, which flickers from the younger Master, the one who killed him on Logopolis and tried to again on the Cheetah Planet, to the Master as the Doctor saw him last. Slim, brown-haired, and manic. "He didn't. Look what happened to him. It drove him mad."

The Doctor shakes his head. "The Time War did that."

"And just what do you think it did to _you_? I remember how you were, afterward. You burned, my Doctor. Became a shell of your old self."

He hates remembering that. Old, burnt-out TARDIS with an old, burnt-out Doctor, everywhere burning velvet and ashes. The moment he'd reached up and felt shorn hair instead of long curls, big ears instead of small, a Northern burr in his voice where there'd been none before. Eight regenerations, and nothing had ever hurt like waking up from that one. His TARDIS had been a comfort, then.

"What does that have to do with you wearing the Master's body?" he asks.

The TARDIS smirks, changes the room back to the bedroom it should be, and seats himself in a chair, legs over the arm. "What will you do if he comes back?"

"He's dead. I burned his pyre myself." Then, with sudden suspicion: "Why? What have you seen?"

"The question, my dear Doctor, is why haven't you seen it?"

"Seen what?"

She rolls her eyes in a perfect approximation of this Master. "Must I tell you everything?"

The Doctor reluctantly nods, and she sits up. Focuses that dark gaze on him, and it's so like the Master that the Doctor's stomach clenches. She knows perfectly well what her walking around in this body is doing to him.

" _Zagreus waits for the end of the world, for Zagreus_ is _the end of the world . . ."_ , she recites, and he recognizes the final verse of the old rhyme.

"What?" he says. "That's it? Just the end of the world? Been there, done that. I see one of those a day! I thought you were going to tell me something important."

"Listen!" she hisses, turning back into the former Master, dark beard and blue eyes. That one always frightened him - well, not sixth-him, because sixth-him was a bit of a fool and not scared of anything - and he finds he can't take his eyes off his old enemy. "The Ood have seen it. I have seen it. And you refuse to see it, because you're still a frightened child, but you need to listen. Remember the rhyme. Remember the laws of the Divergents. I'll become incorporeal again, but I'll be waiting for when you finally get what's happening through your thick skull."

The TARDIS-in-human-form dissipates, and he's left with just her pleasant buzz in his mind. What was she warning him about? That old Zagreus rhyme? It's just a children's story; told in whispers when you're a Time Tot and Mummy and Daddy want you to stop playing with your build-a-black-hole kit and go to sleep. Spending forever playing the Game of Rassilon. Giving your true name to the Toclafane. Zagreus at the end of the world.

Oh, he's getting old. Scaring himself with kids' stories. What he needs is a vacation - medieval England is beautiful this time of year, and he's always wanted to learn how to joust. Yes, that's it. Good Queen Bess and her battles against the Spanish Armada. He'll go visit the Ood afterwards.

 _(His time is the end of time, and his moment, time's undoing . . .)_


End file.
